Socialism and the age of endurance
What can Marxism do for us if we are unlikely to see socialism any time soon?
One of the most curious assumptions of contemporary capitalism discourse is the widespread belief that we have entered something called “Late Stage Capitalism,” typically with the implication that revolution is right around the corner. The main rationale for this is always just a kind of subjective judgment about “how bad things have gotten” and a conviction that “workers aren’t going to take much more”. This perspective may feel true if you are a downwardly mobile American comparing your lot to the lives of your parents and grandparents, but from a historical perspective it seems to me entirely unfounded.
Even if one buys the emisseration hypothesis, which holds that it is worker resistance to their increasing exploitation that will ultimately bring down capitalism, there are good reasons to believe that workers are unlikely to snap anytime soon. Why? Consider the Gravettians:
The world at 20,000 BC is inhospitable, a cold, dry and windy planet with frequent storms and a dust-laden atmosphere… People survive wherever they can, struggling with freezing temperatures and persistent drought…[their] dwellings are igloo-like but built from mammoth bone and hide rather than blocks of ice… Life is tough: hauling the bones, building and repairing dwellings, cutting and breaking tusks into sections… 1
These people lived lives that were far worse, by several orders of magnitude, than anything anyone reading this will ever face. And contrary to the stereotype of cavemen as half-conscious morons, the Gravettians had thoroughly modern brains; they would have experienced this world just as you do. But what’s crucial to appreciate here is that the Gravettians put up with this life for about 9000 years. By the time their culture disappeared, the first mammoth shelters they built were older than the pyramids are today.
There is a related problem in anthropology that Colin Renfew called the sapient paradox: biologically modern humans roamed the earth for nearly 200,000 years, but only adopted the trappings of civilization quite recently. Here we must ask: Why didn’t the Gravettians at least build better shelters like mud huts? How did their tool-making technology stay stuck at chipping away pieces of rock for nearly ten thousand years? It is understandable that living through an ice age would slow a society’s progress considerably, but ten thousand years is (on human scales) a very, very, very long time. Why didn’t people do more to change their material conditions?
I have no idea; but what I do know is that they didn’t. Nothing about living in obscene misery for several millennia forced the Gravettians to make radical changes to their society, or for that matter even modest changes, the kind that seem trivial to us in retrospect. They just endured. Why assume that we are going to react to the persisting miseries of capitalism any different?
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To get a sense of just how long capitalism could be with us, consider what I’ve often called the “company town” path to socialism. There is ultimately no way to predict which of capitalism’s contradictions will eventually bring it down, but I have always intuitively thought this one the most likely since it relies on features of capitalism that the state has proven extremely bad at managing: privatization and capital concentration.
And it centers around a phenomena that we have seen over and over again: the company town, a kind of quasi-state structure that can emerge within capitalism when enough of the government has been privatized, and when most (if not all) of the local economy becomes integrated into the same private bureaucracy. They used to be extremely common in the United States and are still fairly common today, particularly in the developing world. On the left one occasionally encounters a certain mythology that CTs declined in the United States because of opposition by labor, but as historians like Czambel and Crawford have persuasively argued, the proximate cause really appears to be postwar rising wages in the early-mid-twentieth century. That affluence, of course, is rapidly disappearing in the United States today.
Privatization is an inevitable expression of capitalism’s relentless drive for profit, and even when it causes serious social problems, liberal governance only seems capable of slowing it down. The same, of course, holds for capital concentration: pundits like Matt Stoller can call for antitrust all they like, but as companies become too big to fail and too influential to break up, this ultimately proves a lost cause. In tandem, these privatization and concentration seem to inevitably give us the company town: private interests decide it would be more efficient and more profitable to organize more and more of the local economy under one roof.
While these trends may seem diametrically opposed to anything resembling socialism, I think CTs are likely to do two things that socialists should take quite seriously.
First, there does not really appear to be any logical limit to their expansion. CTs have mostly failed in the past when workers became affluent enough to essentially buy their way out of localized economies, but historically much of that affluence in America came from us picking low-hanging technological fruit and benefitting from our geographic isolation during WW2. There is no reason to believe that historical incidents like this will always bail democracy out, particularly as we watch massive corporations like Amazon start to build CTs around the US. That Amazon has also built CTs in other parts of the world shows us another limit that the private sector can move past: national borders. With a market cap that exceeds even medium-sized developed economies like Spain and Australia, Amazon has proven that size is not an issue for private power; the logistical and managerial problems of scale and complexity that plagued states like the Roman Empire and the Soviet Union do not seem to be all that challenging after the rise of modern computing and telecommunications. Even bourgeois economists like Parag Khanna predict a “new world order rule by global corporations and megacities — not countries”; this is only at odds with a Marxist analysis insofar as it envisions a permanent market of competing CTs rather than their gradual consolidation into a single global monopoly.
This brings us to the second feature of CTs that socialists should take seriously: their tendencies towards centralization and efficiency. On one hand, capital is gradually consolidating functions performed in diverse ways by multiple states under the umbrella of a single board. Supply chains that deliver staple foods to cities on opposite sides of the world can be wholly controlled by a single company. On the other hand, capital moves towards performing these functions as efficiently as possible. In part this is just a side-effect of centralization: when you replace two distinct governments, each with its own byzantine mechanisms of power shaped by long and complex histories, with a single structure of corporate governance, you are probably going to get something a lot simpler. But this is also, of course, because of capitalism’s irresistable drive to maximize profits.
What I think capitalism will eventually create, then, is a de facto sovereign, fairly centralized, and remarkably efficient structure for delivering what Marx called “the necessary wage” — that is, the bare minimum of what workers need to survive — to people all over the world. This is obviously dystopian in one sense, but in another it solves the greatest challenge facing socialism: the need to build an international system that is not bound by national states and that can produce and redistribute resources at an international scale. What is left, from here, is for workers to take control of that system and establish democratic mechanisms for its governance. That is by no means an “easy” or simple task, but it is one that faces fewer challenges than paths to socialism usually encounter. Even more importantly, it is one that sails with the headwinds of capitalist development rather than against them.
Supposing that something like this is the process that gets us to socialism, imagine how long it could take to play out. Individual nation-states continuing to bleed out their sovereignty until there is nothing left. Massive international monopolies passing through a state of naked imperial competition until their economic interests become so entangled that we see mergers instead. This is a story of hundreds or even thousands of years — not decades. Will socialists, like evangelicals waiting for the rapture, spend all that time preaching that revolution is just around the corner?
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Bertand Russell, on the decline of the Roman Empire:
The economic system was very bad; Italy was going out of cultivation, and Rome depended upon the free distribution of grain from the provinces. All initiative was concentrated in the Emperor and his ministers; throughout the vast extent of the Empire, no one, except an occasional rebellious general, could do anything but submit. Men looked to the past for what was best; the future, they felt, would be at best a weariness, and at worse a horror…[here] we see the difference between a tired and a hopeful age. In a hopeful age, great present evils can be endured, because it is thought that they will pass; but in a tired age even real goods lose their savour.2
Socialism, as practiced today, was developed in an age of hope. Marx wisely declined to make much more that the vaguest predictions about the fall of capitalism, but he lived during years of radical economic transformations and this plainly informed his activism. The revolutionaries of the early twentieth centuries saw a world where labor activists and bands of militants could still topple entire empires. It was their understanding of material analysis and their grasp of the private property system that compelled socialists to predict that capitalism must fall; but it was their position in history, in the age of hope, that encouraged them to add “soon.”
Elsewhere, Russell compares Marx’s role in society to Abrahamic religion:
To understand Marx psychologically, one should use the following dictionary…The Second Coming = The Revolution…The terms on the left give the emotional content of the terms on the right, and it is this emotional content, familiar to those who have had a Christian or a Jewish upbringining, that makes Marx’s eschatology credible.
Russell is trying to criticize Marxism here, but I think we can salvage his comparison by replacing “credible” with “persuasive.” In the days of the early Church, it was believed that Christ had visited earth quite recently, and this, rather than some intellectual / theological argument about the apocalypse, is what made his imminent return easy to believe. Similarly, in the days of Marx, social unrest was growing, and the memory of the bourgeois revolution against feudalism was not that distant. Marx was easy to believe not because people were smarter or because the arguments for it were more rigorous, but simply because such things seemed much more likely at the time.
What I think makes Russell’s parallel insightful, however, is that most people don’t believe in an imminent apocalypse anymore. And the reasons for this are well understood: as millennia passed and Christ did not return, it became clear even to believers that the early Church had proceeded with a certain naivete. Today, there is no real reason within the framework of orthodox Christianity to maintain that Christ will not return soon; and yet in practice, Christians who say it will happen tomorrow are generally regarded as oblivious and uncoupled from reality. Once the core of this teaching was “Behold, I come quickly”; today, it is “No man knows the hour or the day.”
The public’s reception of Marxism has undergone a similar shift, though one that I do not think socialists themselves are often aware of. Today it is actually not uncommon to even hear liberals magnanimously concede that capitalism “can’t go on like this forever,” or that “perhaps someday we’ll get to socialism”; it is not a sincere concession, but it works precisely because people still find the notion of eventual economic transformation hard to dismiss. The target of ridicule now is the notion of imminent revolution. Liberalism parodies today’s socialists as would-be revolutionaries precisely because the notion of capitalism collapsing tomorrow seems absolutely ridiculous to everyone. Indeed, it seems even more ridiculous to some than the notion of Christ’s return: as Jameson put it, “It is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism.”
If Christianity is any precedent then I fear the modern socialist is likely to go the way of the modern apocalptic evangelical who builds his entire ideology around an unfulfilled expectation. Consider just a few of the consequences:
Evangelicals routinely predict a rapture that never comes; and when this happens, it discredits not just their prediction, but their entire worldview.
As evangelicals predict a world that remains uncoupled from reality, they predictably attract a certain kind of devotee: contrarian, opportunistic, prone to disassociative thinking, and so on.
Because their optimism is grounded in a world that no longer is, the evangelical is constantly tempted to recreate that world that was: they are tempted, in other words, into reaction. Evangelicals constantly romanticize the early church’s faith in Christ’s imminent return, for example; and this has often led them into arguments like “there was something about having a male leadership that led them to this correct conclusion.”
Compare this to tendencies we can see on the socialist left today:
The convinction that we live in the age of late stage capitalism has fed everything from hilarious triumphalism about the growth of DSA to absurd speculation that BRICS is some kind of nascent anti-capitalist coalition.
The conviction that we live in the age of late stage capitalism has attracted conspiracy theorists who resort to crazier and crazier explanations for its persistence; opportunists who build their entire rhetoric around outflanking competitors with revolutionary optimism; and (it must be said) an unusual proportion of folks who plainly suffer from varying degrees of ODD and schizotypal personality disorders.
Because their optimism is plainly grounded in a revolutionary period that is no longer with us today, the socialist is constantly tempted to try to recreate it through a kind of revolutionary nostalgia. Thus we see (for example) appeals to tangential expressions of bigotry in early twentieth century Marxism (expressions one can find everywhere in that age) as expressions of an “authentic” Marxism that we must return to.
Philosophies developed during an age of optimism about change are a poor fit for an age of endurance, when we can clearly see that the world has not changed and is unlikely to change anytime soon. In an age of endurance, such philosophies become the province of cranks, revolutionaries, and frauds. They have nothing but false hope in imminent salvation to offer the world; most see through this farce, and only an unfortunate few buy into it.
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Many readers, I suspect, will read this article as an attack on Marxism itself. What is left of socialist praxis in a world of early capitalism? Marx himself famously wrote that “philosophers have only interpreted the world…the point, however, is to change it.” So what is the point of a Marxist philosophy in a world that will eventually change, but that is unlikely to change anytime soon?
I do not think I can provide a satisfactory answer to this question here, but I do think I can at least offer a starting point: Marx’s own method of historical materialism. As socialists, we have often used a similar method to compare ourselves to Bolshevik or Maoist revolutionaries. We know how they managed to overthrow capitalism, if only temporarily, in the context of their specific material conditions.
But what if, instead, we were to compare ourselves to a very different underclass: medieval serfs at the dawn of feudalism? Suppose that tomorrow you wake up and find that you now live in (say) ninth century Britain. You are destitute and landless, but you are inexplicably blessed with an intuitive grasp of the principles of Marxist theory. This allows you to deduce, correctly, that the basic structure of the economy is not going to change anytime soon. There are no clever arguments you can make or ferocious rebellions you can start that will overthrow the feudal aristocracy in your lifetime, or even in the lifetime of your great great great grandchildren. The economy itself will have to evolve in certain ways that are impossible to predict, but that will change the balance of forces enough to allow for successful challenges to the feudal lords. For example, the heavy plough, which has recently been invented in Northern Europe, will have to become widely adopted enough to spread prosperity to the peasantry, which will be one of the first steps towards the bourgeois revolution; but you do not know any of this, and have no way of knowing any of this, and even if you did it is unlikely that you, a destitute peasant, would be able to do a single thing to accellerate this process.
What can Marxism do for the doomed medieval serf? If the point of philosophy is simply to change the world in some kind of revolutionary sense, then the answer seems clear: absolutely nothing. But I can still think of all kinds of reasons why I, reborn as a medieval serf, would still want to be a Marxist:
Marxism would help me to understand that my lot in life is not due to some kind of personal inferiority to the feudal aristocracy. I would not think of myself as slothful or unintelligent or somehow less valuable than men who had only achieved their station by luck of inheritance. Similarly, I would not think this way about other people either.
Marxism would correctly calibrate my political ambitions. I might do things that I think could one day, in the distant future, have revolutionary consequences; but I would not do things with the expectation of immediate victory. For example, I might risk my life rebelling against my lord, but I would not do so because I believed it would have immediate world-changing consequences.
Marxism would help me to understand our world correctly rather than incorrectly. I would not, for example, write as King Alfred did that the laws I wrote had some kind of mystical link to Mosaic law, a claim that has proven embarrassing in light of history, because I would have understood that the law simply expressed the superstructure of the feudal economy.
Marxism would give me hope that while many things about the current world seemed terrible, and unlikely to change anytime soon, they would eventually have to change because of systematic features of the fedual order that guaranteed it.
This is how I, at least, think about Marxism in an age of endurance. Just as anthropology has given us the sapient paradox, so historical materialism implies its own puzzle: most people throughout history have not lived in an age of economic revolution. How they should live is a question that Marxists, particularly today, cannot afford to ignore.
After the Ice by Steven Mithen, pp. 8-9.
The History of Western Philosopy, pp. 249.